Reports of Unidentified Flying Object: The English Corn Circles in 1988 – The Double-ringers
In August 1987 there had appeared near Bratton in Wilt shire a double-ringed Circle which was unique. It consisted of a circle, fifty-five feet in diameter, in which the wheat was flattened in a clockwise swirl, surrounded by two concentric flattened rings, each about three feet wide.
These rings were separated from each other and from the central circle by belts of standing wheat about eight feet wide that were quite untouched. Most remarkably, the com had been flattened anticlockwise in the enclosed ring, and clockwise in the other one. Nothing like this has been reported previously anywhere in the world and this served to confirm the evolving nature of the Com Circles.
In June 1988 three of these double-ringers, of similar size and configuration to the 1987 one, appeared in Hamp shire within a fortnight. Again the mysterious and extraordinary nature of the Com Circles was exhibited, for anyone who cared to look, in a way that left little doubt in the minds of most open-minded people that these things were intelligently produced. The very precise geometric pat tern showed nothing of the randomness which we associate with natural phenomena, yet the obvious alternative that the Circles were man-made seemed untenable too.
The first of the 1988 double-ringers was found on June 11 on the Longwood Estate in barley, about three-quarters of a mile south-east of the Cheesefoot Head triple. Be sides the large double-ringer there were five additional single Circles (of fifteen feet diameter or less) nearby, seemingly scattered about a line running north-west to south-east through the main Circle. Circles had been found here in the previous year, but nothing quite like this prodigy, which was only the second of its kind ever seen. Then, some days later, the Army Air Corps at Middle Wallop contacted Colin Andrews to in form him that another double-ringer had appeared in a wheat field at Charity Down, thirteen miles north-west, not far from their airfield (Photo 5) . As with quintuple Circles which had appeared at Charity Down in 1985 , this had been spotted from the air, and from that time one has been aware that the military maintain an interest in the Circles, which they regularly photograph from their helicopters.
On June 27 I flew, together with Timothy Good and Ralph Noyes, in a light plane piloted by Leslie Banks with a view to photographing the 1988 Circles which we knew about. Our first target was, naturally, Cheesefoot Head, where we expected to find just the triple set of Circles which had been the first of the season. We were amazed to find not only that set but a huge new double-ringer Circle which had appeared in the punchbowl two days earlier and which we had not heard of (the Photo) . This was of similar size ( 100 feet in diameter across the outer ring) to the other two, and had formed in that part of the punchbowl nearest to the main road (A272) where some of the research group had kept vigil on various nights earlier in the month. Needless to say, nothing had been seen on those occasions.
